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As service providers are moving to the cloud, users are forced to provision sensitive data to the cloud. Confidential computing leverages hardware Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to protect data in use, no longer requiring users’ trust to the cloud. The emerging service model, Confidential Computing as a Service (CCaaS), is adopted by service providers to offer service similar to the Function-as-a-Serivce manner. However, privacy concerns are raised in CCaaS, especially in multi-user scenarios. CCaaS need to assure the data providers that the service does not leak their privacy to any unauthorized parties and clear their data after the service. To address such privacy concerns with security guarantees, we first formally define the security objective, Proof of Being Forgotten (PoBF), and prove under which security constraints PoBF can be satisfied. Then, these constraints serve as guidelines in the implementation of the PoBF-compliant Framework (PoCF). PoCF consists of a generic library for different hardware TEEs, CCaaS prototype enclaves, and a verifier to prove PoBF-compliance. PoCF leverages Rust’s robust type system and security features, to construct a verified state machine with privacy-preserving contracts. Last, the experiment results show that the protections introduced by PoCF incur minor runtime performance overhead. 

Abstract Concerns regarding inappropriate leakage of sensitive personal information as well as unauthorized data use are increasing with the growth of genomic data repositories. Therefore, privacy and security of genomic data have become increasingly important and need to be studied. With many proposed protection techniques, their applicability in support of biomedical research should be well understood. For this purpose, we have organized a community effort in the past 8 years through the integrating data for analysis, anonymization and sharing consortium to address this practical challenge. In this article, we summarize our experience from these competitions, report lessons learned from the events in 2020/2021 as examples, and discuss potential future research directions in this emerging field. 

Abstract Motivation The generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) is an extension of the generalized linear model (GLM) in which the linear predictor takes random effects into account. Given its power of precisely modeling the mixed effects from multiple sources of random variations, the method has been widely used in biomedical computation, for instance in the genome-wide association studies (GWASs) that aim to detect genetic variance significantly associated with phenotypes such as human diseases. Collaborative GWAS on large cohorts of patients across multiple institutions is often impeded by the privacy concerns of sharing personal genomic and other health data. To address such concerns, we present in this paper a privacy-preserving Expectation–Maximization (EM) algorithm to build GLMM collaboratively when input data are distributed to multiple participating parties and cannot be transferred to a central server. We assume that the data are horizontally partitioned among participating parties: i.e. each party holds a subset of records (including observational values of fixed effect variables and their corresponding outcome), and for all records, the outcome is regulated by the same set of known fixed effects and random effects. Results Our collaborative EM algorithm is mathematically equivalent to the original EM algorithm commonly used in GLMM construction. The algorithm also runs efficiently when tested on simulated and real human genomic data, and thus can be practically used for privacy-preserving GLMM construction. We implemented the algorithm for collaborative GLMM (cGLMM) construction in R. The data communication was implemented using the rsocket package. Availability and implementation The software is released in open source at https://github.com/huthvincent/cGLMM. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.